ELWELL, CHARLES• 173was interrogated byMI5but again refused to make any incriminating
admissions. As a result of what was widely perceived as a recruit-
ment pitch on behalf of theNKVD, Oppenheimer was later called to
give evidence before a U.S. Personnel Loyalty Board and lost his se-
curity clearance.ELWELL, CHARLES.After World War II, which he spent as a pris-
oner of war after he was captured in Denmark while delivering an
agent on a motor torpedo boat, Charles Elwell joinedMI5and, fol-
lowing a tour of duty in Malaya, was posted to thecounterespionage
branch. Here he ran several successful anti-Soviet operations, the
best known being the Portland spy ring case, which ended in the im-
prisonment ofHarry Houghton, Ethel Gee, Gordon Lonsdale, and
the AmericansMorris and Lona Cohen. (In his memoirs, Lonsdale
described Elwell, whom he knew as ‘‘Charles Elton,’’ a fellow stu-
dent at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London Univer-
sity where they were both enrolled in July 1956, as ‘‘formidable.’’
They were reunited again under entirely different circumstances after
Lonsdale’s arrest when he was under interrogation in Wormwood
Scrubs.) Elwell also supervised an investigation in the Admiralty, re-
sulting in the arrest and conviction ofJohn Vassall.
Nearly a decade after the Old Bailey trial at which all the Portland
defendants were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, Elwell re-
ceived permission to publish anonymously a short account of Lons-
dale’s background, and this duly appeared in the April 1971 edition
of thePolice Journal. Barely six pages long, the summary added lit-
tle to what was already known about theKGB’s star agent, but this
was not the first time that Elwell had been published. In 1954, soon
after joining the Security Service, Elwell had releasedCorsican Ex-
cursion, a travelogue of a visit he had made to that Mediterranean
island in 1949. Illustrated by Edward Lear, it is a delightful recollec-
tion of a summer spent following the steps of Boswell, who nearly
200 years earlier had made a similar journey and in 1868 had pub-
lished a collection of essays in praise of the island and its indomitable
inhabitants. In addition toCorsican Excursion, Elwell also published
some monographs on the history of the Black Country.
Elwell retired from the Security Service in 1979 but capitalized
on his experience in MI5’s countersubversion branch by compiling a